Women’s Career Stories Convey International Challenges and Opportunities (Four-Part Series/Article 1/4)

Writing a book forward is both an incredible honor and an incredible challenge. When Ana Paula Arbache, Rosaria Russo and Yumiko Watanabe asked me to write the forward for Carreira Feminina (Women’s Career Stories)— a book featuring the incredible accomplishments of successful, career women in Brazil who excelled in the country’s predominantly masculine-oriented culture—I agreed immediately.

I didn’t forecast that this project would spark me to write more—that is, this four-part series—which reflects relevant and important information I researched while drafting the book forward. 

This first part presents an overview of Carreira Feminina. The second discusses the crippling economic effects of gender pay inequity in Brazil and worldwide. The third forecasts opportunities and threats of emerging and evolving Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies as they relate to women. The final article discussed the deleterious worldwide affects of the growing gender wage gap.

Sharing lessons learned from my position at MIT Professional Education, each article highlights the increasingly significant and critical role of online education in 

On one hand, the stories these women shared spurred me to redouble my professional and personal efforts to recruit, retain, support, and promote working women in Brazil and across the world. On the other, their stories frustrated me. I’m angry that women continue to confront obstacles which their male peers either deliberately place in their career paths or do little to remove. That doesn’t necessarily make me a feminist. Like the women profiled in Carreira Feminina, I’m a realist.

Many female readers will recognize the obstacles these women faced. Male readers will hopefully empathize with the challenges they confronted and understand why “breaking the glass ceiling” requires all of us to push harder. 

Each contributor powerfully describes and shares a challenge she faced in her professional life, generating practical, powerful, and persuasive learning for readers. Chapter themes include: Lack of Recognition; Career Choice; Career Realignment; Family life vs. Professional Life; The Fight for the Right of Education; Salary Equity and the Teto de Vidro; Career Reinvention; and Machismo.

Most of these stories could describe the plight of all women worldwide, although women face different challenges depending on where they live and the industry in which they work. 

The challenge these women consistently cite is unfair treatment at work. Their subjective observations align with objective findings of the World Economic Forum’s yearly survey among executives. In developing economies, female executives most frequently mention unfair treatment at work, followed by lack of affordable care for children and relatives. Only in developed economies does unequal pay rank near the top of the list (in part Part 4 you'll discover the deleterious economic effects of consistent and ongoing gender pay inequity). 

While women around the world over the past century have earned and gained rights in and out of the workplace, the stories in this book show that women in Brazil (and de facto other nations) still face significant barriers. The stories also reveal an increasingly organized, vocal, and politically powerful women’s movement comprised of women and men. This movement is partially fueled by the increasing availability and accessibility of high-quality online education—a burgeoning sector in which MIT Professional Education plays a leading role. 

Since its inception 70 plus years ago, the MIT Professional Education office--established under MIT’s largest school (the School of Engineering)—has built on decades of MIT’s outreach to science and engineering professionals. MIT Professional Education has created, offered, and implemented online courses in hundreds of topics. In addition to learning valuable skills and earning valuable credentials, students who complete our courses join a worldwide network of like-minded professionals. The networking aspect is especially significant for women.

Recognizing and responding to the worldwide yearning for advanced learning, MIT Professional Education recently started offering courses in Portuguese (the national language of Brazil, spoken by more than 250 million people worldwide) and Spanish (spoken by more than 538 million people). These courses include:

• Lideran?a na Inova??o (Leadership and Innovation / Liderazgo en la Innovacion)
• Tranforma??o Digital: Tecnologias e suas aplica??es práticas (Digital Transformation: From AI and IoT to Cloud, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity / Transformación Digital: Tecnologías y sus aplicaciones practices)
• Cultural Awareness: Rela??es interculturais em negócios globais (Cultural Awareness for Global Business / Cultural Awareness: Relaciones Interculturales en Negocios Globales)

These and other courses form the core of MIT Professional Education’s nine-month Professional Certificate Program in Digital Transformation (Certificado Profissional em Transforma??o Digital / Certificado Profesional en Transformación Digital). Offered entirely online, the program’s affordability, accessibility, and relatively low weekly commitment of 8-10 hours attracts professional women and men from South and Central America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. The next cycle begins February 2021.

The forward I wrote strikes a cautiously optimistic tone. Ultimately, the stories in Carreira Feminina offer lessons for all professionals, regardless of gender, industry sector, or career stage. We can learn from their experiences to identify and overcome obstacles that inevitably arise during our careers. 

Note: HUBMULHER, the Brazilian organization that collected these women’s stories and funded Carreira Feminina, was founded in 2018 by Ana Paula Arbache as an offshoot of the Arbache Innovations Women's Empowerment Page. The collective’s members include executives from a range of industries and positions as well as academics from Brazil’s business schools and universities. All share the goal of advancing opportunities for women across Brazilian society.